Western Digital subsidiary HGST has unveiled an interesting new enterprise-class hard drive series. The new Ultrastar He hard drives and are the first to be hermetically sealed and filled with helium. The drives offer 6 TB of capacity and have been qualified by some of the biggest companies in the tech world including Netflix, HP, and a number of social media companies.

"With ever-increasing pressures on corporate and cloud data centers to improve storage efficiencies and reduce costs, HGST is at the forefront delivering a revolutionary new solution that significantly improves data center TCO on virtually every level – capacity, power, cooling and storage density – all in the same 3.5-inch form factor," said Brendan Collins, vice president of product marketing, HGST.

The reason the drives are filled with helium is to reduce turbulence inside the hard drive associated with normal air. The helium used inside the drive is 1/7 of the density of normal room air allowing for lower power consumption and lower operating temperature inside the drive.

HGST says that the 6 TB drive uses 5.3 watts of power at idle, weighs 640 g, and runs 4-5°C cooler than a standard 3.5-inch five platter 4 TB hard drive. The drive also uses the HGST 7Stac design to reach 6 TB making it the highest capacity hard drive with the best total cost of ownership for cloud storage and other enterprise uses.

No, evacuating the air from the drive would be pretty simple. Making a drive that would resist the atmospheric pressure would be expensive though (car's tires have about twice the atmospheric pressure, so if your hard drive would survive being run over by a car, it would survive having complete vacuum inside)